ISR News Story

Qu and Wu Awarded AFOSR Grant for Trusted Computing System Design

Prof. Gang Qu and Prof. Min Wu

Associate Professors Gang Qu (ECE/ISR) and Min Wu (ECE/UMIACS) have received a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for research on information hiding based trusted computing system design. Qu is principal investigator (PI) and Wu is co-PI for this 3-year $450K effort that aims at enhancing the trust in systems designed and implemented by untrusted parties.

With the increase of design complexity and outsourcing in software and semiconductor sectors, it becomes inevitable to have the design or part of it developed, implemented, or fabricated by multiple parties. Trust has become an important design concern, particularly for defense and homeland security related computing devices, where ensuring that the design does not contain any undesired functionality is critical. This research investigates a novel information hiding framework based on constraint manipulation techniques to facilitate the verification of the non-existence of undesired functionality in the system.

As a vital component of the Air Force Research Laboratory, AFOSR manages the basic research investment for the U.S. Air Force. The AFOSR seeks to create revolutionary scientific breakthrough and produce world-class, militarily significant, and commercially valuable research outcome.